Kluster
Klopfzeichen

It all began back in 1967 when Conrad Schnitzler, after studying at the modern art academy in Dusseldorf, moved to Berlin and met Hans-Joachim Roedelius. Discovering a shared passion for sound experimentation, they decided to open the "Zodiak Free Arts" club in '69. A club born to allow the exhibition and meeting of young artists belonging to the new experimental wave at the end of the '60s, where for the first time musicians from the rock tradition began to infuse their works with new, synthetic sounds, brought about by the rapidly developed new technological equipment of the last decade and already used in some avant-garde works.

It is here that Schnitzler meets Froese. The two play together in some improvised concerts and collaborate in the realization of the first Tangerine Dream album, "Electronic Meditation," where Conrad plays the cello. In the club circle, there’s also a certain Dieter Moebius who, together with Roedelius, will form the first nucleus of Kluster. The group is completed in late '69 when Schnitzler, coming from the Eruption experience (with Klaus Schulze), joins the duo forming the definitive lineup that will give birth to three albums. The first, which we will talk about, is "Klopfzeichen", released in 1970 and recorded the previous year.

The album represents the union of two distinct components: the psychedelic one, born a few years earlier, inspired by the first works of Pynk Floid and the Tangerine Dream of "Electronic Meditation", which uses distorted and filtered traditional instruments, and that of electronic avant-garde, mainly developed after the second half of the century, where compositions have a predominantly cacophonic structure, without structural order, inspired by the works of Xenakis (see Electronic Works) and Stockhausen first and Subotnick and Douglas Leedy later.

Organ, violin, cello, guitars, flute, and piano passed through echo units and various effects lose part of their timbre, to the point of becoming almost unrecognizable. The instruments compose a chaotic, obsessive sound, where the single notes become percussion or noises with a decidedly industrial flavor. The first track consists of 23 minutes of hypnotic music, accompanied throughout its duration by a female voice narrating, in German, a modern fairy tale from East Germany, giving the composition a marked ritualistic tone. The second track, approximately of the same length, instead offers a completely instrumental sound in which dissonances, noise effects, filtered voices coexist, painting heterogeneous ambient-industrial vignettes that, in my opinion, form the high point of the album.

Definitely challenging music then. One must have the strength not to shelve it after the first listens and project the mind to the years in which it was conceived to understand its innovative vein and the marked social impact it carries, as a direct product of the ferment and desire for change in Germany at that historical time. Some also see poetry in it, like Ed Pinset who describes the reigning chaos in this work like this: "each loop or repetition is slightly out of sync so that each sound event produces a new, kaleidoscopic configuration like a snowflake melting on a slide."

Personally, I consider it a fundamental album, especially historically, because from here passed and depart various personalities who will form an important part in the history of German cosmic music (like the more famous Cluster, with the C), which in turn will influence Eno and from there all of today's electronics. Musically it does not represent an absolute novelty, rather it is the union in the "rock" field of two currents that had already partly developed in different traditions, psychedelia in popular music and electronics in cultured music. A difficult record that I do not feel like recommending to everyone but only to those interested in discovering more about the birth of electronic-stamped krautrock.

7/10